Now on bbc news, the brexitcast team look back on a roller coaster of a year in politics in review 2019s brexitcast. No ones got a clue what brexit is. Brexit is, um. I hadnt quite understood the full extent of this. Were particularly reliant on the dover calais crossing. I met borisjohnson once. The doubters, the doomsters, the gloomsters, they are going to get it wrong again. Remainers and leavers, thats going to end well. A process which i can only describe as a dogs brexit. This is katya adler in westminster. Its adam fleming in westminster. And laura in westminster as well. All together. The three wise people. And were empty chairing, not Ice Sculpture melting, ourfriend chris. He is on holiday already. In new zealand. So he has gone as far away as you can possibly get from brexit. For anyone who is just tuning in and has not seen us, brexitcast is a podcast that is in your podcast feeds multiple times per week. The tv show on thursday night and we just talk about brexit. We also talked a lot about a big giant election in the uk. And a bit of porn. I mean, we are talking 2019 and looking back over the year. And that was a big moment for us, the danish mp advertising on a porn aggregating website. Right, ok lets rewind swiftly. The start of the year was a different cast of characters and in a completely different context talking about different stuff. I suppose the big moment at the start of the year was the mv one. The meaningful vote one. It was when theresa may had a deal with the European Union and she tried and tried to get it through parliament, but it was a total unmitigated disaster. Notjust because the opposition parties did not like her deal and probably were not going to vote for it anyway, but she had a large tribe of eurosceptic conservatives who did not like herand did not like the deal. And that did for her in the end. And she had all of the remain mps as well. So no one was going to be happy. I remember you saying over and over again. How do you make everybody happy when everybody wants so many Different Things . Yeah, and the eu sort of, she went to the eu and said we agreed this deal, and it was argued over and discussed, but can you just give me Something Else to persuade people to vote for it in parliament . And really, i mean, they went to the motions and juncker went through the motions, but frankly, it wasnt very much. It was not enough. And then there was another couple of meaningful votes and they were not as disastrous as the first one, but still pretty bad for her and the most really disastrous thing was the European Parliament elections, which we had to have because we had stayed in the eu beyond the original exit date of march, one of the conditions was that we had to be a part of the elections and the conservatives did super badly. They did extremely badly. And the brexit party did extremely well and lots of people saw that as the straw that broke the camels back for theresa may and not long after that, with the lovely sound effect of adam, she was toast and she was done and the conservative Prime Minister who had tried to keep her Party Together, very much tried to keep her Party Together and tried to keep the country together in an extraordinary period after the referendum, hertime was up. And a famously unemotional woman, she cracked. So i am today announcing that i will resign as leader of the conservative and Unionist Party on friday the 7th ofjune, so that a successor can be chosen. I will shortly leave the job that it has been the honour of my life to hold. The second female Prime Minister, but certainly not the last. I do so with no ill will but with enormous and enduring gratitude to have had the opportunity to serve the country i love. Being in downing street at that moment was quite. British politics is always brutal and that was a particularly brutal moment and there is no question that theres a small number of people in the tory party who tried to bring her down since the day she moved in. Some of them were supporters of the person who followed her in next. When we look back at this and of course, the whole brexit chapter of uk history is going to be pored over for many years to come, but already with the benefit of hindsight, you could. Im often asked does the eu regret not giving David Cameron more when he asked for reform . Does the eu regret not giving theresa may more at the juncture at the beginning of 2019 that could have kept a more moderate brexit than the more hard line conservatives who are now in government . And actually, on both occasions, the answer is no for the europeans because what it came down to David Cameron it would have meant breaking up those eu fundamental rules about freedoms, he wanted to get rid of the freedom of movement for the uk. That was not something that the eu would countenance, because once you give that up for the uk, everyone else wouldve demanded it as well. 0r demand fiddling with other rules. And coming back to theresa may and she wanted to have a time limit at least on the backstop, the famous backstop to keep the irish border open after brexit, and the eu could not do that because ireland would not let them and the eu other eu Member States wouldve accepted a time limit and ireland said no and that is a key point. Behind the scenes, i was hearing a lot of frustration from other eu Member States because they wanted to get it done and dusted and they wanted to get this deal signed off with theresa may, but there was no way that they were going to turn their back on ireland and they wanted to ensure that there would be no customs mess on the island of ireland affecting their Single Market. So, there are no regrets on the eu side. There were a lot of ifs and there is a great story that i cannot tell all of, but there is a story that involves a lot of wine and a lot of very important people from the uk and ireland in dublin at a particularly critical point who thought they might have been able to get there even on time limit, but the proper niche nerds will remember the so called brady amendment and lets not go into all of that here. But something happened in westminster and all that possibility went away. So we are up to the end of may, thats when she resigned. That was the friday after the elections on the thursday but the results came out on the sunday. Also, you mentioned the backstop. The backstop takes me back. To solve the problem of how do you have an open border between Northern Ireland and ireland once the uk is out. The idea was you would have a sort of Customs Union between the uk and the eu, a shared customs territory which meant that the uks tariffs to the outside world were the same as the eus to the outside world and you could have a thing that went around the uk and the eu, which means you do not have to worry about the irish border. Which meant that the uk would, in a lot of ways, still be staying in the eu, even though it supposedly left. Which is why it was not acceptable to the tory party and was never going to be accepted in Uk Parliament and that is why the government was desperate to get a time limit because then they said they would do that unless and until, but then it all went away. Regulatory alignment following the eus rules and regulations on lots of bits of the Single Market with the uk voluntarily following the same rules, so you would not have to have checks on goods going from Great Britain just think if you manage to spend hours talking about the backstop. Frontstopping all the way going to 2020. Before we got to the backstop, we had to hire a new Prime Minister and we had the tory leadership contest. We did. Happy memories . I mean, this hasjust been the most extraordinary story to cover
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